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And the winner of the Make Magazine Hardware Hack of Hack Day London is ...
I arrived late back at Alexandra Palace to be greeted by the sight of hackers in the throes of two extremes of activity - either frenzied, bloodshot, hyper-focused key-hammering or fatigue-weary sofa-sprawling sleep. If it weren't for the numerous chirpy and helpful staff, I'd've thought I'd stumbled into a cavernous North London drug den or some palatial squat. The wifi was working, the Cisco and BT engineers working wonders over the weekend: it must have felt like suffering a flat tyre in the car park behind the paddock at the Grand Prix, all those experts and yet still having to call the AA!
On the way there, I had intended to have a play with Yahoo! Pipes, (I can drag and drop with the best of them!) but inevitably I ended up yakking instead. I dined with James and Alex, your friendly neighbourhood Makers, and had a fine chat with Dan Morris, Geekup star from BBC Manchester who is about to move to London.
When we were called back through from the dining hall, all the tables were gone and in their place were a line of chairs facing the stage. There were 3 sizable projection screens, 4 lecterns and at least one laptop per person - more cycles than Katie Melua could count in all Beijing. There was a lot of last minute chipping away at hacks - tweaking, honing - each group of hackers was a 24-hour Start-Up preparing their hack for its first public showing. A few yawns, but not as many as you might think considering how hard people have been working.
Chad Dickerson was the compere, keeping the 90 second hack presentations flowing. The audience were equipped with magic BBC wands, with which they could signal whether a particular presentation had impressed them. The judging panel were comprised of David Fylo, Matt Locke from Channel 4, Rasmus Lerdorf and a whole bunch of others, (to whom I apologise for not catching their names).
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Chad in full flow |
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The 73 Hacks were called up in batches of ten, streaming to the lecterns in Just In Time fashion, like travellers called forward to board a plane. In true techie style, they kicked off with Number Zero, Word Up, who had hacked two dance mats to make giant mobile phone keypads on which competitors went head-to-head using their patented dance moves to text words that were flashed onto a screen. Great fun, and one of my favourites!
It got too much trying to type in the dark, and I kept missing everyone's names, plus it felt rude finishing typing a sentence instead of clapping each presentation, (some journalist I am!), so I abandoned my report and abandoned myself to the spectacle on the stage. Over the next couple of hours, we saw hacks that checked delic.io.us links for 404s, hacks that crammed as much demographic data as possible onto Yahoo! maps - crime rates, primary schools, etc - in order to determine where best to live, hacks that played Top Trumps using a person's Social Networking data as their powers - Twitter as their charisma, Blogging as their Will Power etc - and a whole host of others, including Gervase and Euan's menthos and diet coke-powered rocket photography. Special mention goes to the BBC guys who got themselves refused access to the BBC's own iPlayer for hitting it too hard, and to UNDemocracy - a They Work For You for the United Nations - which was my personal favourite, and which for my money has the most immediate practical use. For light relief, we saw a couple of games of Faceball.
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Back through to the dining room for more pizza and announcement of the winners of the weekend's prizes.
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Matt McAllister asked me to come up with a Make Hardware Hack of the weekend, so who better to defer to than the two Makers themselves, James and Alex. It was a role they were born to, winkling out the hardware hacks from the software hacks, deciding which were 'true hardware hacking' or which were simply hardware programming. After a couple of quick chats with contenders, they came to their decision. It was democracy in action.
And the Winner of the Make Hardware Hack of Hack Day London was ....
... The Blimp team, who won a year's subscription to Make, to be split between the 8 of them! Congratulations!
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Judge Alex, (left):
"A nice example of what you can do with microcontroller and the way it can be linked to a PC to control it over a net. A good example of physical computing."
Judge James, (right):
"Highly commended is the wireless rabbit signaling semaphore with its ears, but for sheer hardware hacking it has to be the Blimp team. What they have done is not trivial, and anything airborne is great"
Alex explained the technology behind the blimp:
"They use an Arduino microcontroller to control the motors which control the direction of the blimp. They communicate between the Arduino and a PC using a serial link: they had planned to use Bluetooth for communications so it would be wireless but too many bluetooth devices were in the room. They took directional instructions from people on the web and the majority command won: the Blimp went where the most people wanted it to go. They also used GPS to geolocate the Blimp on Yahoo! Maps."
The overall winner for the weekend was the New York Times team.
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Family commitments meant I had to dash home before the band, unfortunately - did anyone stick around? Any cop?
Endnotes
The ropey pizza not withstanding, top marks to the organisers for getting everything right. The constant supply of Mars Bars, Kitkats, muffins, water, coffee, tea and crisps was really appreciated, the branded Hack Day water on the tables was a lovely touch, as were the branded Hack Day beanbags and the great t-shirts the staff were wearing. As a corporate event, the BBC and Yahoo! had done their damnedest to ensure the whole weekend was informal, fun and, importantly, uncorporate: no one felt sold to, which is the cardinal sin these days! It was one of those weekends where you felt you can trust the motives of the guys putting it together: they come in the guise of their corporation, but they wanted to see cool stuff built regardless of whether it was with their API's, each other's API's or even with Google's.
Yahoo! have done themselves a power of good over the last few years. Five years ago the perception was they were on a par with Alta Vista or Lycos, pleasant enough but they didn't take your breath away with their innovation. Nowadays they are giving Google a run for their money, they might even have the ascendancy at present. Hack Days are great fun, real geek-centric hands-on fun, and you really can see Yahoo! implementing some of the hacks that came out of it. Politically, the BBC have to tiptoe more carefully in their announcements and their innovations, but every now and then you see their R&D team and Backstage come out with something that is stunning, and all the more so because you know they had to fight for their project at umpteen internal meetings facing down many a clueless middle manager, (I might be doing someone a disservice there, but I don't think so). Both organisations seem to work best when they allow small groups within their infrastructure to behave like Start-Ups, with the clout of the conglomerate but with the agility of an independent team.
Thanks to everyone who organised the weekend. Much appreciated.
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